Sutoku Tennō

Sutoku Tennō (1119-1164) was the seventy-fifth emperor of Japan, enthroned being a child in 1123. Officially he was the son of Emperor Toba, although an insistent court suspicion had him as the son of this one's grandfather, the cloistered emperor Shirakawa, rumor that poisoned from the beginning his relationship with Toba and that historiography collects as root of his misfortune. In the system of cloistered government, who really commanded was not the emperor on the throne but the retired sovereign, and Toba never let Sutoku exercise real power. In 1142 he forced him to abdicate in favor of a half-brother, and at the death of Toba the succession line deviated towards another brother, Go-Shirakawa. Sutoku was thus left aside twice from the power that corresponded to him, accumulating a dynastic grievance that tradition signals as the origin of all that came after.

In 1156, Toba dead, the succession dispute erupted into the open war known as the Hōgen rebellion. Sutoku's faction was defeated by that of Go-Shirakawa in a night of combat in Kioto, and the retired emperor was captured and exiled to the province of Sanuki, on the island of Shikoku. There, far from the court, he devoted himself to Buddhist devotion and dedicated years to copying sutras in his own hand, an enormous work conceived as penance and as an offering. When he sent those copies to the capital asking that they be deposited in a temple, the court, fearing that they were loaded with malefice, rejected them and returned them to him without opening them. That slight was the breaking point: the humiliation of exile could still be endured, but having his religious offering returned as if it were poison ended up breaking him inside.

Enraged by the rejection, Sutoku bit his tongue and with his own blood wrote on the sutras the oath that made him legendary: to become the Great Demon (daimaen) of Japan, to make the sovereign a commoner and the commoner a sovereign. He stopped cutting his hair and nails until he became unrecognizable, and died in 1164 transformed, according to tradition, into a tengu of enormous power. The misfortunes that followed, the fall of imperial power and the rise of the warrior class, were attributed to his curse. The Hōgen Monogatari transmits the blood oath, and the tale Shiramine, in the Ugetsu Monogatari by Ueda Akinari, imagines the poet monk Saigyō visiting his tomb and finding an incandescent spirit that refuses to be appeased. The fear lasted centuries: in 1868, on the eve of the Restoration, Emperor Meiji ordered his spirit to be brought back to Kyoto and consecrated in the Shiramine shrine, seven hundred years after his death. He is one of the three great onryō of Japan.